Paging DYFS, catching up, etc.

Day of Guilt. I am a bad mommy, I've been thinking about Micah needing new shoes for a week or so, but never managed to get us to Village Shoes to do something about it. Today, on the way home from Sound Beginnings, he woke up as we were almost home so I decided today is the day.
Last time we got shoes for him was on a trip to Oma's last fall. Size 6. Measured today, size 7.5 - almost eight. One ticket punched on the guilt express. And we have a second kid with wide feet so it limited our selection a little bit, but overall I think Micah found the experience satisifying because when we got in the car to leave, he looked at his feet and said, "Wow, SHOES."

Our morning was spent at Summit School. The mommy group was especially heinous today because I didn't have much to keep me occupied other than cleaning out my mental sock drawer, having brought the scraps to write up my call slips but having left the booklet of pink messages at home. Fortunately the mommy whose voice was getting on my last nerve has a child who turns three and is aging out of the system at the end of this month. And I work the next two Wednesdays, so no group for me. By the time we go back, it will just be the cochlear implant moms and their usual minor monopolization of the group. Majority rules, whatever, them I'm used to.

I still need to connect the camera to the computer and download a bunch of pictures. Micah Thea and I went to Oma's the week/weekend of the 26th-30th. Oma had an appointment at the nail salon on Friday, so I went to Babies-R-Us, bought an umbrella stroller and took Micah and Thea on Metro to go downtown to meet up with my friend Lorrie and see the cherry blossoms. Thea had her own farecard so she thought she was all that and a bag of chips.

We got there early so we got off at the Smithsonian stop and went to the Air and Space Museum, which was a huge hit with Thea. ("I'm the luckiest girl in the whole world!" - Mommy will remind you of that comment one of these days, Miss T.) Then we subwayed it to Federal Triangle, which is not the Federal Triangle stop of 1995, the last year I worked in DC. Someone has built a huge building there, named it after Ronald Reagan (doesn't he already have an airport named for him dammit?) thereby throwing both of us off the proposed meeting place. Fortunately, we connected despite all of this and set off for the Tidal Basin. Thea was a trooper - we only had the umbrella stoller for Micah - which Aunt Lorrie pushed, for which I was probably not sufficiently expressive in my thanks. I miss the Stand-n-Stroll that was such a help in China but didn't survive much beyond the trip, it is the best stroller for the toddler/preschooler como, IMHO. The cherry blossoms were beautiful, the crowds weren't horrendous (the actual festival started the next day), and the whole trip exhausted them enough that they went to bed early that night.

Oh, and we had another ER visit, this time at Civista Medical Center in LaPlata. Micah was walking backwards, fell on a sofa pillow (that he had earlier pulled off of Oma's couch) and hit the back of his head on the brass handle of the drawer on the TV cabinet. Small hole in the back of the boy's head, and since I nearly didn't take him to the ER for the forehead thing that took four stitches, I thought it should be checked out.

When the triage nurse put the thermometer in his armpit, Micah said "all bettuh", which was cute. We got sent over to the fast track side and had to wait 20 minutes or so - long enough for Micah to discover a small plastic cup for medication on the floor, crutches that were propped against the wall and the rolling gurney-side table. By the time the physician assistant saw him, the small hole had swollen enough that he said just to put antibiotic ointment on it. Four mini packets of Bacitracin and a dose of ibuprofen for the $50 co-pay; peace of mind, priceless.

Now he just has a scablet on his head that everyone thinks is a tick. No, it's just a scab, I broke the baby. Again. Stop picking at my kid's head.

Not much else going on. Tomorrow I have EMR training - our electronic medical record system goes live at the end of the month, so in preparation I have to sit in one place for three hours (read: a nightmare, the one thing I don't have to do in my job is sit still), in front of a computer screen, with my phone on speaker setting connected to a training teleconference. I'd rather have a rectal and a root canal. Simultaneously.

Thea learned how to sing the Barney song in Chinese. What a nightmare. I hate Barney in English and his status is not made any better by putting him in Mandarin. (I much prefer "I love you, you love me, let's hang Barney from a tree. . . but I don't think Thea's Mandarin proficiency is at that level, yet.

She's sleeping in her Dora bed these days, which beats having a 60 lb. snoring lump in our bed. We had a couple of partial successes with the 100 Good Wishes Quilt and her 'real' bed, but it's going to be incremental progress to evicting her into her own room. She loves that quilt as much as Soft-Soft, her fuzzy blanket from Betty at my office.